Non-Fiction

Last year I wrote about Doctrina Christiana, St. Robert Bellarmine’s catechism for adults. Though excellent, it’s also rather short. Not that a catechism should go into great detail on every point, since it’s intended as a brief introduction to Christian doctrine, primarily stating what the Church’s main doctrines are and not a full explanation, but one can easily think of enough additional questions after reading it that many readers would benefit from something longer. Of course, one could look to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but this is long enough to be intimidating and, in some cases, doctrines aren’t spelled out as clearly as in Bellarmine’s catechism. I’d still highly recommend keeping a copy of the CCC on hand, but the ideal would be a catechism somewhere in between.

Probably anyone who’s been Christian long enough to have listened to more than a few sermons has heard, time after time, that we should pray at all times. This is partly a generalisation of how every major Biblical figure seems to pray before and after doing just about anything of importance, as well as many specific instructions to pray frequently, but it’s stated most directly by St. Paul at 1 Thess. 5:17, “Never cease praying,” and by Christ Himself at Luke 21:36, “Keep watch, then, praying at all times, so that you may be found worthy to come safe through all that lies before you, and stand erect to meet the presence of the Son of Man.” When quoted directly, preachers typically qualify it as not literal, but nonetheless, how does one go about praying at all times?

Recently, I’ve been working my way through Scripture, and one thing it’s reminded me of is how wild the Old Testament gets, particularly in the Book of Judges. It makes one fully appreciate why the sacred author says twice, including the very conclusion of the book, that “In those days there was no king in Israel: but every one did that which seemed right to himself.” The only times that Israel wasn’t a near anarchic, heathen-ridden mess was under the guidance of the judges.

For the most part, when I’m looking for something to read I stick to well-trodden paths. Usually, that means the Western canon of literature, though even among recent writers or non-fiction I tend to stick to authors with an established reputation, like Tim O’Brien or Christopher Clark. Occasionally, though, I do take the road less travelled by, and though I’ve never found anything life-changing this way, it has provided some of the books I’ve simply enjoyed the most, like Samuel Fussell’s Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, Eric Talmadge’s Getting Wet: Adventures in the Japanese Bath, or W. H. Matthews’s Mazes & Labyrinths. Another just-finished work to add to this list is Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages, so I thought I’d share it as a recommendation and offer a few brief thoughts about it.

I just finished listening to the audiobook version Harold Bloom’s 2001 book, How to Read and Why. I often enjoy books about books, and since I’m occasionally asked for advice on how to jump into literature and Bloom seems to be a well-respected writer, I thought it’d be worth giving a shot. Overall, it’s good and I’d recommend it, but with some conditions and, for most people, not before a couple other works in the genre.

It may be hard to tell since I didn’t really review it, but I loved Anabasis enough that I was eager to read more from Xenophon right after finishing it. He’s one of the fortunate Classical authors to have had many of his works survive to the present day, so there’s plenty to choose from. His Socratic dialogues seemed like an obvious next step, but I’ve decided to put that on hold until I finish Plato’s. In the meantime, I noticed that Robin Waterfield, who did the excellent translations for Anabasis, The Histories, and The First Philosophers, has translated a collection of his shorter works, published by Penguin Books as Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises.

Though I’ve been interested in Confucianism for much of my life, I’ve only relatively recently begun seriously working through the Confucian canon, namely the Four Books and Five Classics. Now, working through the canon seems like a logical start to understanding the philosophy, much like working through Scripture to understand Christianity, but there is a drawback. That is, the canon by itself does not tell us how Confucianism was understood and put into practice within China. For me it’s still more-or-less an abstraction, and I fear reading my own ideas into the texts too much and ending up like a Confucian equivalent of SWPL “Buddhists,” who refashion that faith in their own image with no concept of what the religion actually involves.

Mencius Moldbug once wrote that the Right is fundamentally oriented towards order. That’s not a rigorous definition, obviously, but it does have more than a grain of truth to it. The modern, Liberal mind may instinctively leap from “order” to an image of a totalitarian, regimented society, but order essentially means, simply, each aspect of a society working as it ought.  In book XII, chapter 11 of the _Analects _Confucius is asked about government, and he says, “Let the prince be a prince, the minister a minister, the father a father, and the son a son.”  Interestingly, though not the goal, increased order also leads to increased liberty, but you can find more about Reaction and liberty from Moldbug or a more recent article by Doug Smythe.

Like any bibliophile, I have stack of books that I plan on reading eventually, so it’s fairly common for a book to hang out on the shelf for months, even years before I get around to it. As soon as I heard about From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, though, I knew I had to make it priority. So, after only, well, a year or so, I got right to it. After all, it features many saints and Fathers of the Church, as well as other luminaries like Origen, William of Ockham, and John of Paris. Unfortunately, it suffers the same weakness as almost all anthologies, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Those of use who’ve been around the Right for very long are well aware of that there is no shortage of blogs out there. Social Matter’s weekly reviews link to hours worth of reading material, and that just covers Neoreaction and its immediate neighbours; if you venture into the Alt Right, and especially if you include the Alt Lite, you’ll never have time for anything else if you try to keep up with everything. A lot of that material is valuable for several reasons, but unfortunately, the web logging format has some limitations. Though it works for occasional commentary or introductions to larger topics, there’s just not room to go into depth in any one subject, at least not comfortably. So, speaking for myself, the blogging format has grown rather stale. I’ll still occasionally find a new writer with some worthwhile archives, but at this point I only follow a handful of them and Social Matter’s weekly round-up.